Tom Ford (2016)
In Austin Wright’s Tony and Susan, first published in 1993, Tony is the protagonist of a soon to be published novel-within-the-novel. Susan is the reader of the manuscript of the novel. She’s surprised to receive this from the author, her ex-husband Edward, with whom she’s not had contact in years. Dedicated to Susan, Edward’s novel is called ‘Nocturnal Animals’: she’s always been an insomniac – during their brief marriage, Edward called her a ‘nocturnal animal’ – and she reads the manuscript at night. Tom Ford, as well as directing, wrote the screenplay for his film of Wright’s book. Ford retains the basic scheme of the original but his decision to give the movie the name of Edward’s novel is significant. It draws attention to an inherent challenge in turning this piece of literature into cinema – even if unintentionally (Ford may have thought Nocturnal Animals was simply a catchier title than Tony and Susan). While the film can retain formal parity between Wright’s two narratives, Edward’s shocking crime story will, on screen, tend to be more exciting than watching Susan read the story – and Ford eschews the use of internal monologue to tell us what she’s thinking as she reads. One of the interesting features of Nocturnal Animals is that the Tony part doesn’t, in the event, eclipse the Susan part. This too may be the result of things Tom Ford didn’t quite intend.
In Edward’s story, Tony Hastings (Jake Gyllenhaal), his wife Laura (Isla Fisher) and teenage daughter India (Ellie Bamber) drive through West Texas at night. They’re en route to their holiday home for a few days. The family’s car is forced off the road by nocturnal animals in the form of three redneck hoodlums (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Robert Aramayo and Karl Glusman). Powerless to stop two of these men from abducting Laura and India, Tony is forced by the third to drive to a patch of abandoned land, where Tony himself is abandoned. Next morning, he manages to find a farmhouse, from where he contacts the police. Bobby Andes (Michael Shannon), the detective assigned to the case, discovers the dead bodies of Tony’s wife and daughter, both of whom were raped before being murdered. A year later, Andes contacts the guilt-wracked Tony: one of the three men suspected of the crimes has been shot dead while committing a bank robbery and Andes asks Tony to identify another of the men, who is now in custody. The bereaved husband and father then joins forces with the detective, who reveals that he is terminally ill, to bring the one culprit still at large to extra-legal justice. The finale is a gruesome confrontation between this man, Ray Marcus (Taylor-Johnson), and the formerly mild-mannered Tony. Neither of them gets out of the story alive.
Susan (Amy Adams) is wealthy but troubled – in her work running a fashionable Los Angeles art gallery, in her second marriage – to a financier called Hutton Morrow (Armie Hammer). He’s out of town – and playing away from home – throughout Susan’s sleepless nights reading the manuscript. She’s gripped and shaken by ‘Nocturnal Animals’, largely because of what she perceives as its resonances with her youthful relationship with Edward, which Tom Ford describes in flashbacks. Tony’s loss of his wife and daughter reminds Susan that she was unfaithful to Edward with Hutton, and had an abortion when she was pregnant with her first husband’s child. It seems her marriage to Edward was in trouble even before then because he felt she didn’t sufficiently encourage his writing. ‘I think you should write about something other than yourself,’ she ventures. ‘Everybody writes about themselves,’ is the touchy reply. This exchange is evidently still in Susan’s mind some fifteen years later: as she reads ‘Nocturnal Animals’, her mind’s eye sees Tony as Edward. This isn’t the only reason why Tom Ford has Edward, in the flashbacks, as well as Tony, in the novel-within-the-film, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. Perhaps anxious about the limited dramatic scope of the Susan material, Ford seems to think the presence of the same actor in both the movie’s halves will somehow equalise their dramatic charge. Thirty-five-year-old Gyllenhaal is physically convincing as twenty-something Edward and forty-something Tony but the dual casting turns out to be problematic – because of the particular themes of Nocturnal Animals and because of Tom Ford’s shortcomings as a film-maker.
Many people who regularly read novels and see movies struggle, if they read a novel after watching the film adaptation of it, to rid the novelist’s creation of the actor who has incarnated it on screen. Familiarity with this syndrome gives the viewer of Nocturnal Animals a kind of sympathy with Susan, for all that her situation as a reader is so different and individual; but it also raises questions about the logic of her visualisation of Edward’s story. If Tony is inescapably Edward, who are the sources of the other people Susan sees in ‘Nocturnal Animals’? In particular, doesn’t she see herself as Laura or her daughter Samantha as India? At one point, Ford has Susan make an anxious phone call to Samantha (India Menuez). Because this sequence is oddly disconnected and Armie Hammer’s Hutton looks too young to have fathered a girl now in her late teens, I wasn’t sure if Samantha was Susan’s fantasy of the daughter she’d have today if she’d not had the abortion years ago. Even if Samantha is a fantasy, however, the above question still applies.
Susan gets a paper cut removing Edward’s manuscript from its envelope. The cut is an effective foreshadowing of the lacerating force of his novel: by the time she’s finished it, Susan is convinced that ‘Nocturnal Animals’ not only is the tale of Tony Hastings’s revenge on the forces that destroyed his family but also serves as Edward’s revenge on her (and that this is why she’s the book’s dedicatee). Tom Ford’s dramatisation of ‘Nocturnal Animals’ doesn’t, however, live up to this billing. It has the quality of an accomplished but orderly pastiche of Southern Gothic. It lacks the motive force and crazy momentum needed to make us feel, as well as understand, the powerful effect that Edward’s prose is having on his ex-wife. ‘Nocturnal Animals’ takes a long time to come to life. When it does so, this is thanks to Michael Shannon, whose dying lawman is more vivid – and more real – than almost anything else in the film. Shannon, strikingly slim as Elvis Presley in Elvis & Nixon earlier this year, is alarmingly lean here. His ambiguous, unnerving presence makes Detective Andes hard to read but somehow threatening. The actor’s loss of weight makes it all the more convincing that Andes turns out to be nearing death, and careless of how justice is done.
The trouble is that Michael Shannon upstages Jake Gyllenhaal, which seriously upsets the scheme of Nocturnal Animals. Gyllenhaal is conscientious and able as Tony but Tom Ford’s penchant for elegant design exposes the artificiality of the proceedings – especially the matching of Tony’s and Susan’s actions: he takes a bath or shower to cool down after each new stage of his trauma; Susan does likewise, to recover from the shock of reading about it. This fancy rhyming is more damaging to Gyllenhaal in the Texas badlands than it is to Amy Adams in the deliberately chilly chic of Susan’s world. As the vicious psycho Ray Marcus, Aaron Taylor-Johnson may be slightly better than usual but, playing a character who’s meant to be scary and unpredictable, he needs to be much better. Taylor-Johnson is at the centre of a scene that illustrates perhaps better than any other the nullifying effects of Tom Ford’s style above substance. Andes and Tony go to interview Marcus while he’s sitting on a toilet (which is placed outside his front door). Not only do we see Marcus wiping his bum; after he’s done so, we also get a momentary shot of the piece of toilet paper he’s used. If Ford means this to shock, he fails: the viewer is less likely to be disgusted than to note the discreetness of the brown marks on the white paper.
A few of the images created by Ford and his cinematographer Seamus McGarvey are more powerful, at least in their immediate impact – none more so than those in the film’s opening titles sequence. This features a succession of drum majorettes strutting their stuff. They are far from young, seriously overweight, and virtually naked except for their headgear. The look and the movement of their bodies are extraordinary. The women are then revealed to be part of a new installation at Susan’s gallery and don’t connect substantially with anything that follows in Nocturnal Animals – except for one detail. I may have imagined this but I thought the woman to whom Ford’s camera keeps returning during this intro had a bloodstain at the side of her mouth; if so, this anticipates a wound on the mouth of Tony’s daughter when her corpse is discovered. This might be just another example of Tom Ford’s patterning but it could also be a relatively convincing instance of Susan, as she reads ‘Nocturnal Animals’, drawing on her own experience to visualise details of the novel.
Amy Adams gives a technically impressive performance. Although she’s playing a woman around her own age, the immobility of her face suggests a world-weary mask: Adams makes Susan beautifully old before her time. She may be insomniac but she also seems a sleepwalker in her own life. When she sustains the paper cut, a majordomo is on hand to take over the opening of Edward’s surprise package. In the last scene of the film, Susan goes to meet Edward for a dinner date. (As a final way of getting his own back, he doesn’t show up.) She’s escorted into the restaurant and to her table by her PA, before a waiter takes over attending to her. This is a woman whose privilege is virtually debilitating. The contrast with her vitality in the flashback scenes with Edward is enough to be almost poignant. In the short time they share the screen, Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal really spark each other. I think these bits are strong not just because we’re shown Susan and Edward in happier times (initially, at least) but also because the two stars get to do some acting in them and achieve a short-lived independence from Ford’s image-making. It didn’t make sense to me that Armie Hammer had the same glazed, impersonal handsomeness as both the Hutton who took Susan away from Edward and the one with whom she’s become so bored that she’s nearly indifferent to his affairs with other women. Laura Linney, Andrea Riseborough and Michael Sheen all do expert work in one-scene roles (Linney as Susan’s mother, Riseborough and Sheen as LA beau monde friends). Abel Korzienowski’s score includes hints of Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo music – apt enough for a movie whose protagonist, like Vertigo‘s Scottie, clings unhappily to an idea of another person that amounts to mistaken identity. But Tom Ford is no Alfred Hitchcock.
4 November 2016
